Privacy

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Privacy has become one of the defining issue of the Information Age. CIS has received national recognition for its interdisciplinary and multi-angle examination of privacy, particularly as it relates to emerging technology.

Joseph Bonneau is a postdoctoral researcher at the Applied Crypto Group at Stanford University and a Technology Fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, supported by a SUFP Fellowship from the Open Technology Fund and Simply Secure.

Ryan Calo is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former research director at CIS. A nationally recognized expert in law and emerging technology, Ryan's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired Magazine, and other news outlets. Ryan serves on several advisory committees, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Future of Privacy Forum.

Professor Danielle Citron is the Lois K. Macht Research Professor of Law. She teaches Civil Procedure, Information Privacy Law, Internet Speech, and LAWR I. She was voted the "Best Teacher of the Year" by the University of Maryland law school students in 2005.

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Block chain technology is taking the world by storm. From banking to health care, many tout block chain and the bit coin it enables as a cure-all. Others think bit coin is heading towards the edge. In between are those who see practical applications of block chain but caution on addiction to bit coin. On February 26th at the University of Copenhagen, I made a presentation entitled "Block chain technology -- good, bad, or somewhere in between?" This entry gives you a sneak preview of that talk.

On January 17, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued its opinion in State v. Diamond. It affirmed the appellate court’s holding that compelling a defendant to provide a fingerprint to unlock a seized cellphone (for which police had a warrant) did not violate the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.

The essay below serves as introduction to the Stanford Center for Internet and Society's Law, Borders, and Speech Conference Proceedings Volume. The conference brought together experts from around the world to discuss conflicting national laws governing online speech -- and how courts, Internet platforms, and public interest advocates should respond to increasing demands for these laws to be enforced on the global Internet.

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On Wednesday, the Trump administration appointed the renowned computer science professor Ed Felten to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). This is the first time that a nonlawyer has been appointed to the board, even though it has oversight responsibilities for a variety of complex technological issues.

For decades, U.S. policies on international data sharing have balanced privacy, principles of comity (respect for the jurisdiction of other countries), and respect for Congress’ power to regulate foreign affairs. Foreign countries seeking data held by U.S. companies generally must follow a process laid out in Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties, or MLATs, which are agreements between governments that facilitate cooperation in investigations. Increasingly, however, countries have complained that the MLAT process in the U.S. is slow and that it allows the U.S.

Which would you prefer: keeping your valuables in a locked safe, or keeping them in a shoebox and trusting that everyone will adhere to laws against theft and their concomitant penalties? Most, if not all, of us will choose the former. That’s so even if we realize that safe-crackers may ultimately find a way someday to bust open even the most top-of-the-line safe currently on offer.

Just after Valentine’s Day last year, New Yorkers were treated to a very unusual digital billboard ad draping one side of the Port Authority in Manhattan. It read: “Dear person who played ‘Sorry’ 42 times on Valentine’s Day, what did you do?”

Arguing that a defendant’s conviction for website hacking should be overturned because legitimate, highly valuable security and privacy research commonly employs techniques that are essentially identical to what the defendant did and that such independent research is of great value to academics, government regulators and the public even when – often especially when — conducted without a website owner’s permission.

Arguing that the information publicly available on the NSA's Upstream program, combined with an understanding of how the Internet works, means plaintiff Wikimedia has met its burden of proving standing to challenge Upstream.

Arguing that if the court should not compel Apple to create software to enable unlocking and search of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, it will jeopardize digital and personal security more generally.

"Even Hutchins’s defenders say if he’s guilty some punishment is in order, but his prosecution also sends a mixed message. Hutchins had been a model of public-private cooperation at a time when the government was having difficulty recruiting cybersecurity talent. (James Comey irritated the community in 2014 when he said the FBI struggled to hire people because “some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview.”) Some security researchers said they would stop sharing information with the government in protest.

""Given the alleged facts in this case, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see more lawsuits," says Woodrow Hartzog, a law and computer science professor at Northeastern University who studies privacy and data protection issues. "Oftentimes you will have state attorneys general who might even work together if that appears to be the best course of action. They'll probably be using the facts in this case as an example of how not to respond to a data breach.""

""Using facial recognition to help the visually impaired or as a tool to identify and combat cyber harassment is notable, because the positive uses of facial recognition technology are pretty limited to fun and maybe authentication," says Woodrow Hartzog, a law and computer science professor at Northeastern University who studies privacy and data protection. "It's interesting now to see different uses. We collectively need to watch that to see how it plays out.""

Eight years ago, Barack Obama arrived in Washington pledging to reverse the dramatic expansion of state surveillance his predecessor had presided over in the name of fighting terrorism. Instead, the Obama administration saw the Bush era’s “collect it all” approach to surveillance become still more firmly entrenched. Meanwhile, the advanced spying technologies once limited to intelligence agencies have been gradually trickling down to local police departments.

Join Mozilla and Stanford CIS for the second installment in a series of conversations about government hacking. Information from our first event, discussing the upcoming changes to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41, are available at that event’s page here.

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Stanford Cryptography Policy Project, we are holding an afternoon event highlighting our research and accomplishments over the past year. As our keynote speakers, it is our pleasure to welcome the Honorable Stephen W. Smith, Magistrate Judge of the Southern District of Texas, and Paul S. Grewal, former Magistrate Judge of the Northern District of California.

Journalists are supposed to serve as “watchdogs” on the government. But how do they get access to the information they need to do that? In this episode, we talk to BuzzFeed lawyer Nabiha Syed about “freedom of information” laws — which are often the secret to getting government secrets.

Lecture held during the First International Congress of Fundamental Rights and Criminal Procedure in the Digital Age, organized by InternetLab in partnership with the Faculty of Law of the University of São Paulo.

Cryptography Fellow Riana Pfefferkorn gave a lecture titled "The American debate on surveillance and encryption".

If you attended a recent march to protest, wrote a check to the ACLU, or recently visited a politically leaning website, consider yourself an activist, says Stanford legal scholar Granick. Not only might the government be watching you, but your digital footprint could end up being visible to people and organizations you never imagined would care. Know your risks and take safety precautions, advises Granick, or don’t be surprised at the troubling outcome.